Ina Garten wanted her childhood bedroom to be black and white with splashes of purple, but instead her mother made it peach with flowers all over the place.
Garten hated peach, but growing up without the ability to make her own choices left her with peach walls.
In an interview with Hoda Kotb on TODAY Oct. 1, Garten unpacked how her upbringing led her and husband Jeffrey to decide to remain child-free.
“When I got married, I just thought I would be the wife and we would have children and we would have a traditional relationship,” she said. “In my 20s, I kind of resisted having children. I was like, why would I want to re-create that nightmare that I just came from? And I thought that’s what life at home with children would be. (It) never occurred to me that other people’s lives were different because that was my experience.”
In Garten’s memoir, “Be Ready When the Luck Happens,” she wrote in detail about her childhood, specifically the tumultuous relationship she had with her parents.
She kept putting off having kids, she shared. “And then one day, maybe when I was around 25, I thought, I just don’t want to have children. I just don’t want to do that,” she said. “And thank God (Jeffrey) is amenable to what I would I want. He wants me to be happy and it was OK.”
Garten has been open about the fact that Jeffrey originally wanted kids, telling Julia Louis-Dreyfus on her podcast “Wiser Than Me” that she thinks Jeffrey “would have been a great parent.”
“He would have really loved having children,” she said on the podcast. “But, he wanted me to be happy and it was OK with him.”
Garten, also known as the “Barefoot Contessa,” told Hoda that she and her husband never had an official conversation about not having kids; they just checked in with each other from time to time.
“It was just one of those things that every once in a while, it would come up and I would just go, ‘Hm not now, not now, nah I don’t think so,’” she said. “And then it would come up again, maybe a year later and I was like ‘Mmm, I don’t think the time is right.’ And then it just never came up again.”
Garten also opened up to Katie Couric on her podcast in 2017 about this choice.
“We decided not to have children,” she told Couric. “I really appreciate that other people do, and we will always have friends that have children that we are close to, but it was a choice I made very early.”
Hoda asked Garten, who has become a beloved chef, author and TV personality, if she is still satisfied with her choice to remain child-free.
“I see my friends who are madly in love with their children, have a wonderful life,” she said. “I just don’t know if I would have been a good parent and I love my life the way it is now and I couldn’t possibly have had it if I had children, I just couldn’t have done it.”
In November, Garten told BBC News that her childhood was the largest factor in her decision against having children.
“It was nothing I wanted to re-create,” she told the publication. “And I’m always looking forward to look back and realized a lot of my decisions were based on my childhood. And so, I think that was the motivating factor. And Jeffrey and I were just so happy together.”
She credits Jeffrey with giving her the confidence to express herself in a way she wasn’t allowed to growing up.
“I was really so restricted as a child. I wasn’t allowed to think for myself. I wasn’t allowed to do things,” she said. “I was — my ideas were thwarted. I was always told whatever I wanted to do wasn’t a good idea and so I wasn’t myself. I was scared and I was alone and when I met Jeffrey, he was just the opposite. Everything I thought was brilliant, everything I wanted to do was just a wonderful idea.”
I was really so restricted as a child. I wasn’t allowed to think for myself. I wasn’t allowed to do things.”
Ina Garten
Hoda, a mother of two herself, asked Garten if she ever received displays of affection, like hugs and kisses, as a child.
“No hugs and kisses in my family,” she answered. “It was a very cold, lonely existence and I have to tell you, it took me till I was like 40 to understand that (my childhood) was different from other people’s childhoods.”
Garten admitted that, as a child, she was unsure if her mother even loved her.
“I don’t know that she was capable,” she said. “I think she did the things a mother should do. She would take me to museums, she would get food on the table. She would do the things that she knew a mother should do, but none of it was done with joy or warmth or ‘I see you and I think this will make you feel good.’ And that’s what my whole world is about. That’s what I love to do. I mean, I take care of Jeffrey because I love doing it. It just gives me such joy to make something that he loves.”
“She didn’t understand me actually, I’m sure about that,” Garten continued, tearing up slightly.
While Garten felt a disconnect with her mother, she expressed being outright afraid of her father, surgeon Charles Rosenberg.
“My father had very strict views of what we should do,” she said. “Such as, when we did homework, we get straight As, that we play tennis. There are certain things he expected of us and anything even slightly, that slightly deviated from that was met with extreme anger.”
Garten elaborated that this “extreme anger,” which she said was sparked by anything, even her getting an A- in school, could escalate to violence.
“You know, like hitting, so it was scary,” she said. “I actually stayed in my room to stay safe. And can I just say people had much worse childhoods than I did, I mean, I had lots of opportunities.”
In her memoir, Garten also writes about a time when she was about 13 years old when her father told her that nobody would ever love her.
However, Garten said that her father changed after she married Jeffrey, telling Hoda that he finally began to see her and even apologized to her years later.
“For a man to say, a father to say, that ‘I was wrong and you were right and then we could have a perfectly fine relationship’… (I was) shocked. I didn’t even know how to react.”
With her less than perfect childhood, Garten reflected on her own inner strength.
